Jul 7, 2015: Walking through the list of ‘abandoned’ stories has been an interesting experience thus far.

This time I ran into a pretty average teen romance novel with more pros than cons.

Given the labels here you can drop the ‘coming of age’ one. Any real growth is only hinted at very late in the story. The same goes for the bad-boy label on the publishing-site—the love-interest is sweet, considerate and very keen on not reverting into his former self.

So, the story. Twenty odd year old boy meets teenage girl. Mutual feelings occur. Bad mistunderstanding happens. Final reconsiliation and declaration of love ends the story. That’s about it.

Oh, and everyone is solid American well to do and educated middle class.

If this sounds like a turn-off, it’s not. This is a romance, and everything standing in the way of the story is removed as it’s superfluous and would turn the story into something else even though with a strong romantic theme.

If you like following a first person female POV during the latter half of her last high school term and experience her falling in love with a genuinely decent guy, then do read Pivotal Moments. It’s well paced with the usual high school conflicts and stereotyped secondary characters. It even comes with a likable mother (think Joyce Summers in Buffy).

If you can’t stand systematic (but not disturbingly so) errors in language, or if you abhor an equally systematic difference between how the main character thinks and what she thinks. Then don’t read this story.

While I found the language errors a minor problem, the clash between the how and the what did turn me off. The heroine uses a mental abstraction machine (brain) far, far ahead of the first love she tries to convince the reader that she’s experiencing. In the end I just had to either roll with it or drop the read.

Now for some meta info. When I followed the link I was surprised to end up on Wattpad. Pleasantly surprised as that’s the platform I prefer despite a number of cons.

When I saw the one million reads I was stunned. It showed clearly how two on-line writing communities still are two distinctly different worlds. Featured story in one place and not a single review in the next.

Three and a half stars. Four if you’re into general teen romance, which I am not, and as for a recommendation I’ll follow the same rule. Not from me, because I don’t read standard romance, but if I did I would recommend it as a fun binge-read.

The story is complete, and an in-progress sequel can be found at the same place.

3 of 4 members found this review helpful.
Help us improve!  Register or log in to rate this review.